David Gerard writes: Here in the future, musicians and record companies complain they can't make a living any more. The problem isn’t piracy — it’s competition. There is too much music and too many musicians, and the amateurs are often good enough for the public. This is healthy for culture, not so much for aesthetics, and terrible for musicians.

Whenever any website announces an "exciting upgrade", it usually means they're in the process of screwing up whatever was good about the site before, in favor of whatever their pointy-haired bosses think will make a better business model.

ehrichweiss writes "The Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics is warning parents and teachers of a new threat to our children: sounds. Apparently kids are now discovering binaural beats and using them to get 'physiological effects.' The report goes on with everyone suggesting that such aural experiences will act as a gateway to drug usage and even has one student claiming there are 'demons' involved. Anyone who has used one of those light/sound machines knows all about the effects that these sounds will give and to state that they will lead kids to do drugs is nonsense at best. It seems the trend in scaring the citizens with a made-up problem has gone to the next level."

If it's a truly personal domain, not intended for a commercial purpose, then a.com address wouldn't really make logical sense; better to get a.name or.info address, or.org if you're organized, or maybe something in your local country code like.us or.me.uk.

I'm always trying (with limited success) to get people at work to use RFC-compliant dummy addresses when testing inputs to Web forms where an e-mail address must be supplied. Some "marketing types" absolutely insist on using "test@test.com" all the time, even though that's not one of the compliant dummy addresses. Personally, I always use addresses in the.example dummy TLD when I want nonfunctional test addresses.

I worked for Softdisk back when they were publishing a diskmagazine in the early 1990s named Gamer's Edge, featuring games authored by co-workers of mine who went on to be pretty notable (including John Carmack and John Romero). I seem to recall somebody was threatening to sue the company over the name by claiming ownership of the word "Edge", which seemed rather crackpotted. It must have been the same guy as in this case. It reminds me of Leo Stoller, who claimed to own various words including "Stealth" until bankruptcy caused him to be stripped of whatever alleged rights he might have had.

The_Pey writes: "Recently, an application was pulled from the Apple App Store because of its name. The game in question, Edge, reportedly infringes on the the trademark rights of Tim Langdell to the name Edge. The unfortunate aspect to this whole affair is that Tim is broadly enforcing rights to the name, whether or not he has actually created a game entitled Edge. Much of the history of the trademark ownership is being reported in Tim's wikipedia entry by a user "cheridavis" who bears a lot of similarity namewise to Tim's wife, Cheri Davis Langdell.

Interestingly, Tim was also the source of the reason the game Soul Edge changed its name to what we now know as Soul Caliber.

Can a person really own the trademark for the name of a game, using a four letter word broadly applied across several industries without the owner actually having published a title in the industry?"

Arthur Dent '99 writes: According to this AP story, Carolyn Bothwell Doran was COO for the Wikimedia Foundation for six months before it was discovered that she was a convicted felon with charges of theft, drunk driving, and shooting her boyfriend in the chest. Of interest to me is her apparent connection to the CIA; her father was a CIA official, and her late husband was a former CIA officer who drowned on their honeymoon in 1999 (providing plenty of good fodder for conspiracy theorists). The Wikimedia Foundation is now performing background checks on its officers.

wikinerdiest writes: "Wikipedians are again struggling with back channel invasions of Users' privacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard#.22Private.22_Checkuser_use . This time it is the frequent(admitted) use by many administrators of backchannel (IRC,email) methods to request and obtain Checkuser information without the User checked being made aware of it. This process completely circumvents their official process at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CHECKUSER which seems to be little more than a facade for public consumption. While the official process makes note of the right of Users to complain of privacy breaches, the "private checkuser request" process makes that right mute since the User may not be even made aware Checkuser was used."